A Special Election On January 12th!

Special thanks to our intern, Erica, for writing about Steve Hunt’s scare tactics:

The election of Ken Cuccinelli as Attorney General has left a vacated State Senate seat, one which has Pro-Choice Delegate David Marsden and abstinence-only ‘educator,’ Steve Hunt, battling. We thought it would be helpful to shed some light on Steve Hunt before January 12th rolls around. Please be sure to share his background with everyone you know who votes in the 37th State Senate district!

While not trusting women to make informed decisions about their reproductive health is par for the course for most anti-choice Virginia politicians, Steve takes his anti-choice beliefs beyond a platform and actively seeks to take choice away from the women of Virginia.

Up until 2005, Steve was president of the Assist Pregnancy Center, and through 2006, he served as president of the their Board of Directors. The Center’s website is chock-full of medically inaccurate information about reproductive rights, including the falsehood that having an abortion puts women at greater risk of breast cancer. For example, it states that a woman who chooses to abort a pregnancy has an increased breast cancer risk in comparison to a woman who carriers her pregnancy to term.

The Center’s website also links to Physicians for Life for information about the ‘supposed’ link between sexual activity and suicide, stating, “Girls who were sexually active were 3 times more likely to say they had attempted suicide than those who weren’t. Sexually active boys were nearly 9 times more likely to have attempted suicide.”

His campaign website also reveals he was an instructor in a teen abstinence program, Keep It Simple Say No (KISSN) in the Prince William and Fauquier County Public Schools. Governor Kaine has cut off state funding for abstinence-only sex education programs in Virginia, citing recent studies finding that teenagers should also be taught about birth control and condoms to protect against pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Yet Steve Hunt throws these cautions to the wind and proudly supports misinformation and medically inaccuracies to further his anti-choice agenda.